03/07/2008    |    Devlog    |    Misha    |    Discuss

You’ve no doubt seen the flood of Devlogs about new changes and features coming in 1.2.x, all of which we believe will improve player experience. That’s all well and good for those who can already play. But what are we doing for folks having difficulty playing because of lag or crashes? What about people who have played but then had issues that didn’t get addressed in a timely manner?

We are working on improvements for you too! If you meet three simple requirements, we expect that you should be able to enjoy our game:
1. Your hardware meets or exceeds our minimum specifications
2. You have a broadband connection
3. And you have an active Pirates of the Burning Sea subscription.

Unfortunately, there are those of you who are experiencing challenges to the ideal “three simple steps and you are in!” approach we are striving for, and so today I’m going to outline what we are doing to address these challenges.

Network Lag

One issue blocking some of our customers is network lag. This can appear in different ways.

Some folks have trouble transitioning from the server selection screen to character selection or character creation. They click to enter the server, and are met with intermittent to no access at all. A common thread with this particular issue involves university campus networks, but we’ve seen similar issues with customers using other networks as well. A variation of this issue first came to light during our closed and open Beta programs, and at the time we were able to narrow it down to the fact that the ports we were using were being blocked. So shortly before launch we did some research to determine ports that would be less likely to be blocked – ports used by other MMO titles, for example. We adopted those proven ports in the hopes that would solve the problem. Well, it sounded great in theory, but the issue turned out to be more complex than simply changing the list of open ports.

The issue isn’t so much the range of ports we use, but the type of traffic our game generates. Packet shaping devices like Packeteer classify PotBS traffic as peer to peer file sharing – which it’s not. Fortunately, once this complication was identified, we were able to collaborate with the folks at Packeteer in order to introduce a temporary solution that we quickly shared with our customers at this link. That collaboration included a commitment from our friends at Packateer to continue to work with us until a permanent fix is incorporated into their product.

On our side, DevCo has also been working on changing the nature of our update packets in order to stop the classification as gnutella-cmd. This change will be incorporated into build 1.2.

Another problem some players have experience is an inability to play the game via UDP. The symptoms are movement problems like rubberbanding. You can work around this with a pirates_local.ini change to force the game to use TCP instead. There is a set of routers out there that do not handle large amounts of UDP packets well, and drop them on the floor for various reasons. Your first step in diagnosing this should be to remove your router from the picture completely and plug directly into your broadband modem. If the problem goes away, you should take a look at your router. Make sure you have all outbound ports opened, and you can add inbound UDP port forwarding for ports 7010-7100 for added benefit. Make sure your router is upgraded to the latest firmware as this will often fix the problems by itself.

This will also be significantly improved in build 1.2, as DevCo has reduced the number of UDP packets we send, which will help a number of older routers with UDP problems as well as the game’s UDP traffic over the internet in general.

Finally, if you just have weird network problems, Answer 36 in the Knowledge Base has some instructions explaining how you can get us the information we need to help you. Follow those steps and file a support ticket as indicated, and we’ll help you out as soon as we can!

Graphics Performance

Graphics issues also have caused some headaches. Two things happened in late December – we made a bunch of frame rate improvements, and NVIDIA released some new, faster drivers. For complicated reasons, on high end cards this resulted in a horrible flicker effect. The effect was so awful that we decided to throttle the frame rate (for all users) to make the flicker stop. This stop-gap solution was less than popular. (Duh.)

The good news is that NVIDIA fixed a bug in their driver and even went so far as to provide us with a new set of drivers that are available for your download by visiting this link.

Also we are increasing our collaborative efforts with both ATI and NVIDIA. We’re running our game through their compatibility process as I type this, to make sure that we haven’t broken anything, as well as finding out if there aren’t additional things we can be doing to take full advantage of their technologies.

In other good news, throttling has since been turned off and we continue to make improvements in performance. Ship load times have gotten faster, which will make those unsightly hitches on the open sea less painful. Plus, we’ve made a number of the more common ship models much more efficient, which will also help performance in general in the open sea. We’ve also made some improvements to the amount of time we spend handling sound, which again improves frame rates.

Along the way we fixed some memory leaks that could eventually cause the game to implode. We also fixed a bug in the society lists which made it refresh very, very slowly if you were in a large society – a frequent cause of the dreaded screen freeze.

Customer Service

Your support tickets played a key role in helping us identify those problem areas. Even though we spend our fair share of time communicating with our community members in the forums, your support tickets are really the most fundamental and effective method of communicating directly with the team.

These are important documents, so your support tickets should be simply worded and clear in their descriptions. Please also include:

• Where you were and what were you doing at the time
• How long you had been playing
• The exact wording of any error messages you saw
• Your DXDIAG
• Your last game log file
• And remember – a picture is worth a thousand words. Screenshots showing the problem are also helpful.

The more information we have, the easier it is for us start working on a solution.

What’s that you say? We haven’t been responding to problems quickly? True – we’ve been very backed up in Customer Service. Besides the steps we’re taking to decrease gold farmer spam and make processing those reports more efficient, another big step we’re taking to improve GM responsiveness is to upgrade the flogger. For those of you who aren’t familiar, the flogger is a tool that records a great deal of information about what’s happening on the Burning Sea. We use this tool to confirm reports of harassment, data loss, mission failures, and many other problems. Sure, we expected to get a lot of flog data after we launched, but amassing 1.2 billion (yes, with a B) records in the flog table in a single month far exceeded our initial expectations. :)

Brendan, one of our Devs, has been adding new flog features to aggressively cull older data to keep the overall size of the database down to something reasonable. He’s also working on new flog viewing tools to allow support staff to have much better performance when searching, despite the incredibly large size of the database. These will allow the support staff to investigate tickets much more quickly and easily than they have been. Some of his changes have already been rolled out and have made an impact on our support backlog.

So as you can see, it is definitely a balancing act – find and fix existing issues, continue to tune and polish, while still developing new content and features. But wait! We must do all of this while testing and retesting and testing once more to make certain we aren’t generating any new issues. Rinse, repeat. Fortunately, as we work to create new tools and improve the old ones, our entire process continues to improve. That means more comprehensive support for our customers, which is what this is really all about.

We are well aware that we can’t please all the people all the time. But we believe (and hope you’ll agree!) that build 1.2.x is a good mix of fixes for particularly bothersome bugs, game play tuning and balance improvements, and the introduction of some exciting new features to enjoy and content to explore.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts!

03/07/2008    |    Devlog    |    Misha    |    Discuss